Open Subtitles | Hacker News Reader

Open Subtitles

avc.com

10 pointscwan6 comments

But I think we are witnessing something more profound. As big swaths of the world modernize and gain large populations who have the time and the means to enjoy films, we will see more and better films come from outside of the US.

You know, some of us outside the US have been making movies for as long as you US guys have been. And some of our movies are really good. The fact that you have to go to the Film Forum to see them as mostly your problem. Making it seem like the world is suddenly playing catch up is typical US-centric thinking.

It's not that hard to see foreign films in the US (at least if you lie in a major city, or use Netflix), but I'm happy about the open subtitling because this job normally falls to the distributor of a film and subtitling is an expensive process, usually adding $10,000 or so to the cost of release.

More than crowdsourcing benenfit. Have been thinking that Open Subtitles has chance to transform movie search. Netflix could use Open Subtitles to enhance similarity ranking. Or Apple could let us search quotes in movies and show a few minutes clip around that timeline.

Can anyone explain the legal status of unauthorized translations like these?

I've seen more than a couple subtitle sites disappear, mostly because of copyright issues.

Welcome to the rest of the world.

English is not my mother tongue, however I've been watching foreign films using English subtitles for quite a while. English subtitles likely provide the most utility, at least in internet land.

I also sometimes use English subtitles on English-speaking films. It used to be a must when I was still learning English, but it's still useful for noisy films or films with British/Irish/Scottish people (living in the UK for a considerable period of time didn't help at all).

Anyway, opensubtitles.org was horrible last time I checked. Some better options:

http://addic7ed.com/

http://subscene.com/

http://www.podnapisi.net/

http://forom.com/

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